Characterization of Block Reference Pattern for Flexible and Adaptive Buffer Management Scheme

To overcome the speed gap between processors and disks, many computer systems utilize buffer cache located in main memory. Previous works on buffer cache management mainly use a single fixed block replacement policy such as LRU policy. However, block reference patterns of applications vary depending on the nature of applications, which requires applying different replacement policies to different applications. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive buffer management scheme. Our approach is based on the automatic detection of block reference patterns of applications. The detection is made by associating block attributes such as backward distance and frequency with forward distance of a block. The scheme can classifies four reference patterns: sequential, looping, temporally-clustered, and probabilistic. According to the detected patterns, the scheme applies an appropriate block replacement policy to each application. Also, the scheme employs an efficient block allocation strategy to m..